


Monsters Playing People

by Reneehart



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: BDSM, Body Horror, Breathplay, Choking, Crime AU, Cunnilingus, Erotic Horror, F/M, Graphic Description of Corpses, Hermione is a criminal profiler slowly losing her grasp on reality, Implied Cannibalism, Murder, Vaginal Fingering, Vaginal Sex, Violence, and tom is a very bad psychiatrist, bad bdsm actually, but if we're being honest its a hannibal au, dont take sex advice from fanfic babes, erotic asphyxiation, graphic depictions of sex, unedited we die like mne
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-20
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:27:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24288133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reneehart/pseuds/Reneehart
Summary: Hermione is a criminal profiler losing her grasp on reality, the horrors of her job too much for her fragile psyche. Her psychiatrist tries to get her through it.His methods are rather unorthodox.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Tom Riddle
Comments: 13
Kudos: 173
Collections: Tomione Smut Fest 2020





	Monsters Playing People

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [TomioneSmutFest20](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/TomioneSmutFest20) collection. 



> Tomione Smutfest 2020 submission! My prompt was Crime AU/Police Procedural AU. I’ve been watching a lot of Hannibal though so really it’s more of a Hannibal AU but there’s crime in that so I think it technically counts. ANYWAY. Please enjoy, and heed the tags. This is a very dark fic.

**Monsters Playing Humans**

The office is clean.

It always is. The dark leather sofa sitting opposite the chaise, two chairs tucked between them. There is a desk tucked in the corners, small and made of the same dark wood that the bookshelves are constructed from, lining the walls of the office so that she is surrounded by books. Thick, weighted ones. Expensive texts with the latest theory written within their pages, older hand me downs from forgotten and expired sciences. Journals, too- so many journals.

She often wonders what lies within them, and it is within these moments where she is left alone that she considers flipping through them, skimming the pages of his now familiar and tidy handwriting. She never does though. Partially because she is too kind, too polite to rifle through his things. Partially because she knows they are nothing more than notes of long-ago patients, made irrelevant with the passage of time.

‘ _Other patients,’_ she thinks in correction. She doesn’t like to consider herself as such. The patient to his doctor, the long-suffering mind seeking aid in the form of a psychiatrist. She knows better, logically, than to sneer on therapy and the study of the human mind. She herself studied it profusely, nearly completing her own Ph.D. until her studies and career took a sharp pivot. She knows of the benefits of simply talking to an unbiased and trained person, knows the science behind the pills. She can rattle off the difference between an antidepressant and a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor.

But none of that stops the feeling of shame, the feeling of lead in her stomach at the idea of needing a therapist. It’s easier to consider him a friend, though even that word feels sour on her tongue. Sharp and metallic, like blood and dirt and lies.

She talks to him, not as though he were a friend. Or a doctor. Or even a colleague. It’s hard to define, as uncertain and shaky as she feels, fingers trembling at her side.

“Here, some coffee,” he says, words interrupting her tumultuous thoughts as he enters. He is still dressed just as he was when he answered the door to her pounding knocks- a long robe wrapped over his flannel pajamas, looking unfairly poised and proper even as he was pulled from sleep. His curls were less polished than he often wore them, but still soft and tamed compared to her own.

He is carrying a silver platter, a carafe of coffee and two mugs balanced atop it. There are a cream dish and sugar bowl, and two delicate spoons that clattered in the ceramic mugs as he moved forward and set it down on the coffee table. “One sugar, light cream, correct?” he asks, glancing up at her as he begins to pour the coffee.

She nods.

As he hands her the mug, he says in a lilting, playful voice, “I would have made us breakfast, but I’m afraid it’s too early for me to have an appetite.”

She blanches, as though she suddenly realized just how early it was. As though she had not seen the soft hues of dusk in the sky as she drove to his home, the constellations that faded and slipped from view as she knocked on his door. “I...I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking...I shouldn’t-”

“You weren’t thinking because you were too busy reacting,” he interrupts, turning his back to her as he strides to one of the armchairs and settles in it. He pauses, takes a slow sip of his coffee- black- before adding, “The question is, to what?”

The mug is warm between her hands, a comfort. An anchor. “A dream,” she answers, her gaze distant as she stares through him.

He raises a brow. “What happened in the dream?”

~x~

_She dreams of blood._

_Pools of it, the rhythmic drip of it, like a metronome. She dreams of the bodies hanging overhead, skin flayed and white, stained with the blood that did not fall like rain to the ground. The smell in the air heavy, acidic. She can taste it on her tongue, so powerful the stench. A familiar poison that still burns and aches no matter how often she encounters it._

_She dreams of herself, covered in blood. Like a veil made of death and anguish. It makes her hair clump and stringy, her lips slippery and the deepest red. As though she drank wine, decadence._

_Her hands red, fingers outstretched to the blood that rains down as though a beggar receiving an alms._

~x~

She swallows thickly. “Everything I see during the day. It stays in my brain, like an afterimage. And I see it when I sleep. Only, it’s worse,” she finally says, quickly sipping the coffee. It’s too hot, and she winces as it burns her tongue and throat but drinks it anyway as if to keep herself busy. Delay the admission.

He tilts his head. “Worse how?”

She doesn’t answer right away. The guilt is too thick in her throat to do so, shame making her face warm and her nerves electric. She continues to stare behind him- at him, through him- dissonant as she considers the dream that awoke her, sent her driving to him in the early morning. All of the dreams she has, playing like some perverse and crude cinema showing the same horrific reels each night. She rubs at her eyes, as though she might be able to rub the images clean from her vision.

“It's worse because...I’m the one doing it,” she relents with a sigh.

“Forgive me, but I was under the impression that that was part of your...shall we say process?” he says, resting on elbow on his armrest and curling his fingers over his chin. It’s covered in short, thin hairs from the shave he has yet to attend to, and she is once again reminded of just how early it is.

She feels foolish.

Still, she explains. “It is. It’s part of everyone’s, we’re taught it at the Academy, and especially for profiling, it’s essential for piecing together a crime scene. In order to see how the murder happens, we pretend to be the killer. We see ourselves take the same steps in a room, hold the same weapon, hear the same things they might have heard.” _Whimpers. Pleas for mercy. Begging for help. Gagging._ “But it’s as if they’re becoming more...more real. I used to be able to shut it off. Compartmentalize it all. But I’m finding it harder and harder. And each morning I awake with this guilt, this fear that I-” she breaks off, turning away from him and his questioning gaze. A pregnant pause fills the air between them, visceral and suffocating as he waits for her to finish.

She does not.

She inhales, presses the heel of her palm to her head, and sets the coffee down on the table. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come here. They’re just dreams and I...I’m fine really,” she mutters, feeling an overwhelming desire to leave. Leave before she says anything more damning.

He doesn’t stop her as she pushes through the door.

~x~

_She dreams of flesh._

_Thick clumps of it, tattered and torn as though it were fabric. Flayed open revealing muscle tissue and bones and wet, pink organs. She dreams of the splits between skin, from the pull of a long and dragging blade, clean and efficient like a surgeon’s hand._

_She dreams of maggots crawling through, the flesh rotted and slipping into decomposition faster and faster until it is purple and swollen and inhuman. No longer human. Something dead and gone and replaced by something foul._

_She dreams of herself cutting into it when it is still human and alive and squirming, humming a long-forgotten melody that teeters on the edge of her brain, like a clue she can’t quite see._

~x~

He enters the room, though he doesn’t say anything to her. She recognizes his step, so soft and quiet she isn’t sure how she hears it over the other sounds encompassing her. The soft, constant beep of her heart rate, the muffled chatter from the nurses as they spoke on the opposite side of her curtained-off room. He walks gently, as though he trained himself for that express purpose.

She wonders, briefly, if he hunted as a boy- if his father or another taught him how to walk like that. Like a predator.

Finally, he says, “Are you alright?”

She looks up at him then, blinking at his tall and towering frame that blocks out the light, a golden halo silhouetting his lithe form. “Just a little shaken up, really. Everything else was superficial.”

His eyes look just above her own, where she knows there is an ugly line cutting across her forehead, pulled shut by stitches and medical tape. It thrums dully, eased by the mild pain relievers they gave her. She still remembers the initial pain of the strike when she was hit by the plank of wood, a makeshift weapon by a man desperate to not be arrested.

Her arm still trembles with the phantom recoil of her gun when she finally shot him, once in the shoulder, and then again in his chest.

“You killed him- the Unsub,” he says, the police term sounding odd on his lips. The unidentified subject, the perpetrator, the assailant, the rapist- the serial killer. A neat and tidy umbrella term to lump them all together, these less than human beings. But, she supposed, that wasn’t very fair. Only humans, after all, were capable of such cruelty, such violence. Perhaps they were the most human of them all, these crude facsimiles of monsters made real by perverse thoughts and bloody hands. “How did it make you feel?”

She snorts at the question. “How cliché,” she remarks, shaking her head only to stop abruptly, finding the motion too painful and dizzying. She sighs. “It isn’t the first time I’ve had to shoot or even kill somebody. It’s awful each time, but always in self-defense.” Even as the words leave her tongue, she knows it isn’t true. The first shot to his arm had been enough to subdue him- he was weak and pathetic and groveling. Begging and pleading for his life. He didn’t want to die, he said.

Neither had all the little girls he killed, though. They didn’t get what they wanted, so why should he?

She flinches with the memory, pinches her eyes shut as though she can rearrange the moment in her mind. Make his pleas into threats and his cowering into action. Make the second shot justified.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he says pointedly, head tilting in a thoughtful manner. Something hidden behind his eyes, thoughts he would not turn to words.

She hesitates. She thinks of doctor-patient confidentiality and wonders if that applies to this strange relationship between them. She pinches her lip. “He deserved to die,” she says, swallowing a confession she would not make. Her superiors already believed her story that he attacked after the first shot, and there was no reason to tell the truth. “I’m just not certain I was the one who deserved to kill him.”

“Do you feel guilt?”

She shook her head. “No. He didn’t feel guilt for killing all of those children. Why should I?”

He nodded slowly. “Indeed, why should you?” He glances behind him and out to the nursing station before pulling the curtain closed and taking another step into the suddenly too small room. “Did you like it?”

She narrowed her eyes. “I already said-”

“Not feeling guilt and not feeling joy are two different things, Hermione.”

She doesn’t answer.

She remembers the feeling of relief as he slumped on the ground, eyes growing vacant. Something shifting within them as he gagged, blood bubbling between his lips as it blossomed as an unfurling rose above his heart. She remembers watching him die.

Remembers the fleeting smile she wore.

~x~

_She dreams of bones._

_The gentle curve of ribs, white underneath the dirt that clings to them. The skull, cracked and concave with fissures from the ghost of an attack. The jaw hangs from the rest of it, like a crude smile. They pull apart easily, the sinew and muscles and cartilage deteriorated by time and creatures._

_She dreams of the body rebuilding before her, organs filling the empty space between ribs, brain matter leaking through the cracks in the skull. The cartilage reforming, muscle and nerve endings and veins. She dreams of blood and flesh, covering the bones._

_She dreams of herself digging a shovel into the ground, tossing dirt on the man. He is still alive, faintly. The tenuous remnants of something soon to be extinguished. Sluggish eyes roving around, lips parting in garbled speech._

_She dreams of herself smiling as she buries him alive._

_~_ x~

“Eat, you’ll feel better,” he says, placing a plate before.

She looks to the food- fancier than she expected when he offered to make her dinner. The vegetables are bright and green, the asparagus tender without losing its bite, glossy with the sheen of butter. It sits on a bed of something orange, a puree, and there is a large piece of meat. Dark red and unidentifiable.

“I don’t have much of an appetite,” she says, glancing curiously at the meat.

“Liver,” he answers, and she’s embarrassed that he caught her careful inspection of his food. Yet he smiles despite her poor manners. “I’ve always thought it was rather disrespectful to kill something only for the more desirable parts. One should always honor something that gave its life for us, and turning its corpse to garbage is hardly honoring, wouldn’t you agree?”

She never thought much about it. She didn’t like to consider where her food came from. That something died so she could satiate her hunger, an appetite that always came back. Slowly, she nods. “I suppose that makes sense.”

She cuts into it, lays a small piece on her tongue, and chews.

She doesn’t have much of an appetite, but it tastes good and she cleans her plate all the same.

~x~

_She dreams but it is not a dream._

_Her reality fractures and distorts, brain splitting open so that her dreams slip out. It starts slowly at first. Seeing the faces of the victims from previous investigations hidden within a crowd, gone within a blink. So quickly she can tell herself it was just a trick of light and shadows._

_As though light and shadows can bring the dead back to life. Reanimate rotted and fetid flesh._

_The sounds of the world around her become discordant. Overlapping with the real sounds of her colleagues discussing theories, stirring a spoon in a mug of coffee. She cannot tell if the pleas for help are real. If the screams and cries are of her own making._

_The hallucinations winding so deeply that she cannot always decipher them from reality._

_She feels like she is losing her mind._

_Perhaps she is._

~x~

He kisses her with such ferocity that she wonders, vaguely, if he wishes to consume her. His tongue darts into her mouth, tasting her, and when it slips back it is only because he bites her, sharp nips pulling at her lip. He is aggressive, one hand wound in her hair to tip her head back at the right angle, the other gripping bruises into her hip.

He tastes like the wine they drank with dinner. He said it paired well with the meal, and she nodded along in agreement as if she knew a thing about wine pairings. The tannins clung to his lips, bitter and bold.

He pushes her back until she is seated on the chaise, shoulders rolling softly onto the cushioned seat. He stands between her legs, one knee bent on the chair, the other straight and holding his weight. He continues to kiss her, the action almost painful as he alternates between biting and sucking her lip. He turns his attention to her ear, her jaw, nipping at her skin as her breath turns to pants.

It isn’t proper, a psychiatrist and his patient. She knows it’s unethical, enough for him to lose his license. They never really defined this relationship between them, her refusing the role of patient, denying him the role of friend.

Her thoughts of ethics and morality slipped from her when his fingers brush over the bare skin of her stomach, inching upwards and pulling her shirt with it. She arches her back, allows him to pull her shirt up and over her head. He tosses it away before tipping his head down, lips warm and wet as he kisses down her neck, bites so hard she gasps in pain only for him to kiss it away. He trails down, repeating the same rhythmic pattern- _kiss, bite, suck, kiss, bite, suck_ \- until he’s wetting the lace of her bra as he laps at her clothed nipple.

She gasps, bucks at the sensation.

“You taste exquisite,” he says, glancing up at her with eyes darkened with lust and want and hunger.

She sits up, reaching around to unclasp her bra. The garment slips between them, and his gaze slides down to look at her breasts. Small and modest, her nipples pert and hardened from his attention. His lip curves into a smile as he pushes her down once more. His tongue is warm as he continues his lavishing, this worship where the prayers are found in the drag of his tongue, the supplication in the grip of his fingers into her hips.

She moans softly as he slides down the curve of her breast, kissing the soft underside before peeling his lips back and biting sharply. She gasps, hisses between her teeth at the pain, and is ready to push him off when he licks at his marking, soothing the flared skin. She sighs at the sensation, the shift from pain to pleasure, the memory of his sharp bite quickly turning to dust as he kisses it away. Like the sting of heat on cold pinched skin, too hot for those moments between the adjustment.

He continues down the soft curve of her stomach- she is a thousand curves and angles and sighs and moans in his hands. She sounds lewd, unrestrained as he kneels before her, sucks and bites and licks at her inner thighs. Slowly, purposefully avoiding her center. She feels rather than sees the smirk against the plump flesh of her thigh, and she groans. A plea falling from her lips. _“Please,”_ she begs, sounding pained.

Her cunt aches with need, want, and her legs tremble as she strains and flexes them over his shoulders. She bows her back towards him, shifts her hips and cants them forward. “Tom, please,” she says once more, and he growls at the sound of his name on her lips. It sounds both sinful and prayer-like all at once. A deal with a devil wrapped within the solemn melody of a hymn.

The growl vibrates up her thigh, and she shouts with surprise when she finally feels his tongue against her clit. Perhaps she had too much wine with dinner, as her head spins and she feels as though she would float away if not for the firm hand he has on her stomach, the firm press of his tongue as he drags it languidly up and down against her core. She is dizzy with it all, with the lust and the need and the feel of him, the anticipation of him moving within her. She is dizzy with the sheer appetite, the want within her that feels as though this is not enough, will ever be enough.

She knows even as it is beginning that when it ends, it will not have been enough.

He slips a finger in her cunt, crooks it against the warm and tight walls within her, and she arches forward, groaning loudly as her hands fist into his curls, tugging sharply at them. She wonders- idly, in the back of her mind- if it hurts.

She hopes it does.

Stings like his bite marks that left slivers in her skin, like crescent moons that charted his descent. She loosens her grip, runs her fingers gently across his scalp. It was the pleasure that made the pain worthwhile, after all.

She feels his moans against her, his mouth still wrapped around that oh so sensitive bundle of nerves. It thrums within her, like the twining string of a plucked instrument.

He devours her this way, with two fingers pumping in and out of her, lapping at her with wet, obscene sounds. She might have been embarrassed if not for the wine that pulsed in her veins, belly full and warm with the meal. Embarrassed by the sounds he pulled from her mouth, incomprehensible and spoken between pants. Embarrassed by the dampness of her cunt as he slides a third finger inside her, the slight burn just shy of too much as he stretches her. Opens her up.

She does not care, however, too overwhelmed by the pleasure. She chases that release, something coiling, tightening in her stomach as he pulls her closer and closer.

She tumbles over the precipice all at once, shouting and convulsing beneath him. Her legs tip inward, clench painfully over his shoulders. She bucks her hips, wildly and unsteady, an uneven staccato as her shouts turn to moans. Moans into whimpers.

She slumps back on the chaise, chest rising and falling with her deep breaths. Her eyes are closed as though it requires too much effort to keep them open. All of her focus on piecing herself back together after he pulled her apart. He still has his fingers inside her, and she whimpers when he twists them slowly, experimentally.

He sighs above her, as though he is lost in thought. Lost in the sensation of her tight cunt as it contracts around him. He withdraws from her after a moment, and she blinks her eyes at him, glancing at him from underneath the fan of her lashes.

His fingertips trace the slope of her hip, ghosting a path that leads between her breasts. The touch is light, fluttering, and she hums contentedly as it prickles her skin. His fingertips settle at the of her neck.

“Do you trust me, Hermione?” he asks, but that is not the actual question he intends to ask. It is the facade, wrapped around the true question as if he could hide the nature of it from her.

Her brow furrows. “You want to...choke me?”

His eyes flash. “If you’ll allow me.”

She considers the question. She’s been choked once before, though never in bed, for pleasure. She was ambushed from behind when a partner failed to clear the room.

Years ago, and even now she could remember the gasping sounds she made, the pathetic and unyielding attempts to get oxygen to fill her lungs. The way her chest and throat burned, heat rising in her face and her head filling with a dull pressure. Blood thumping in her veins, sound muffled by the ringing in her ears.

She swallows. “You’ll stop if I…?”

One side of his lips rises in a tilted, uneven smile. “Slap my right shoulder?”

She nods, the motion so small and slow she isn’t sure he sees it. But he does, and he responds with a growl, a look in his eyes that makes her think of hunger. He grabs her hips and tugs her down on the chaise before lifting her up, canting her hips so high that only her mid-back and shoulders touch the cushion.

He slides himself in the cradle of her hips, his cock entering her in one swift and fluid motion. Her legs rest against the straight plane of his torso, ankles hooked over his shoulder. He has one hand curled around her left knee, holding her against him, as the other grips her opposite hip, keeping her supported as she is half-raised in the air.

She groans loudly as he fills her, the uncomfortable feeling of her raised body forgotten when he rocks against her. The angle allows him to fill her deeply. Allows the crown of his cock to nudge at something within her that feels not unlike the strike of lightning to the earth. She trembles with each thrust, with each prod of that delicate spot he seemed to find so easily within her.

She wonders if that was what he was experimenting with when his fingers explored her.

His pace is even, steady. Tortuously too slow as he enters her, igniting that quick and sudden bolt of electricity that flares from her core to her tight nipples and down the line of her spine until her toes are curling.

She pants, tries to move her hips in tempo with his own to force a quicker pace but she is unable to from the odd position. She grunts in frustration. “Faster, Tom. Please,” she begs.

He obeys, answers her prayer in the form of quick, snapping motions, heavy grunts and groans. Faster, harder. That feeling is constant now, the spark from deep within that trembles through her nerves and turns them to mush. Nipples aching in a quiet need for pleasure, something coiling, tightening in her stomach.

She orgasms again, a deeper, more drawn out one. He holds her still as her walls clamp down on him, as she tries to wriggle out of his grasp. Fueled by an instinct that is not her own. She cries and screams and pants, twitching. A hand twists, grasps onto the cushion of the chaise as though she needs to find purchase before she slips entirely from reality. Eyes clamped down so tightly that stars burst in her vision.

He does not allow her the reprieve when the feeling finally slinks away, leaving her drained and heavy-limbed. He moves her as though she’s a doll, a thing to be tossed about as he needs. He drops her legs, her hips so that her feet fall to the floor on either side of him. He clambers over her, grabs under her arms and pulls her up with one big shove, and resettles himself all before she’s even opened her eyes.

She realizes as he enters her and begins to fuck her- for there’s no other word for what he’s doing- that he had been doing her a kindness earlier. That he was thrusting within her in a manner he thought she would enjoy. Slow and purposeful and hitting all the right spots.

Now he seems unbothered by her need, by her pleasure. She has found it twice now and it is his turn as he fucks her mercilessly, digging fingernails into the soft flesh of her rump as he holds her still. She is too far up the chaise now, and each forward movement makes her head collide with the winged back, her neck craning painfully.

She does not protest though, is unable to because he reaches one hand up and clasps it around her neck.

She chokes, gasps on impulse to the constricting of her windpipe. Her eyes shoot open, watches him as he hovers over her. Her gaze follows the line of his arm, the ropy muscles twitching visibly as he squeezes her throat. His chest heaves in great, unsteady breaths, eyes half-lidded as he watches her with a lust-hazed expression.

He tightens his hold, and her chest rises to compensate. As though she simply isn’t trying hard enough to breathe. Something like panic creeps into her muscles, and she resists the urge to slap his shoulders.

She trusts him.

She’s turned to him at her weakest, her most vulnerable. He’s talked her down from her frantic thoughts, helped her smooth and make sense of the senseless. Expressed concern for the concern she felt for herself when others were cold, dismissive.

If she could trust him when she felt off-kilter she could trust him with this.

If she could trust him when she worried she was losing her time and her identity and her sanity, she could trust him with this.

She feels dizzy, head fuzzy and uncertain. There is a distant ringing somewhere, and dots prickle her vision, white-hot stars that spark and burst and die before her.

Time seems to slip, nebulous and forgotten as she fades, her chest burning with the pressure of needy and hungry lungs. She feels him shudder, his clasp loosening on her neck as he reaches the crest of his orgasm. Warmth floods at her center where they meet, his cum filling her as he pumps his release, a tangle of incoherent sounds and muttered praises- _perfect, so wonderful, all mine-_ leave his lips. His cock twitches within her, a pleasant sensation that sends flutters along her stomach, crawls up her spine.

He stills after what feels like an eternity, the meager amount of oxygen allowed by his loosening grip barely sustaining her. A taunt, a tease, and the fire in her ribs was stifling and overwhelming when he finally pulls his hand away.

  
Her chest rises sharply, harshly, wincing in pain. Her throat is bruised, aches with each inhalation. But the air feels like nourishment, tastes like euphoria, and she sighs with an unnamed feeling. It’s decadent, this indulgence of something that had previously been denied. Like water to parched lips, a feast to the famished, she is greedy with her gulping breaths.

She feels satiated, in more ways than just the ease of her arousal, her own slick and his cum coating her thighs. She feels satiated, anchored by the burn of her breath. She is here, she is alive.

If nothing else, she knows this for certain.

He pulls from her, stirring her attention. Soft and limp now that he’s had his share, and he falls to lie down with her, draping his body over hers. The chaise is far too narrow, and he pulls her into a tight, possessive hold.

There is silence.

She wonders if he regrets it. If he fears he’ll lose his license.

She’s surprised when he speaks, his hands playing mindlessly with her errant curls. “You’ve become very inconvenient to me,” he says.

She scowls, uncertain of what to say. “Oh?”

He nods, unaware of her offense. Or uncaring. “I don’t think I could live without you,” he says, and there is something about his tone that makes her heart stutter. A beat skipped. Something reverent, something beyond the loving and placating words a lover says to another after a tryst. “I dare say, you’ll never be rid of me.”

She swallows her apprehension at those words, ignores the threat that curls within the spaces between the vowels. “You assume I want to be rid of you?”

He hums, considering her words. “You’re too good for me,” he says after a moment. They are delicate in a way she can not place. Humble, almost. Whispered, as though he’s afraid if he speaks it she’ll see the truth and leave.

She laughs at this. Deliriously. “Too good? I’m practically losing my mind. I’m either dying of a tumor or slipping into madness, and you think I’m too good for you?” She chokes on her words, even as she tries to sound nonplussed. A sob threatens to break free as she is confronted with the reality she had forgotten in the throes of passion.

She’s losing her mind.

He holds her tighter, shushes her as he runs his fingers through her curls. “What is madness but a more keen perspective?” he says, as though it is meant to abate her fears. “We’ve all got madness in us. We’re all just monsters playing humans, trying to find other monsters whose madness accepts our own.”

She doesn’t realize she is crying until he wipes her tears away.

~x~

She hopes she is dreaming.

She clenches her eyes tight, opens them and whimpers when the image remains before her, the scene unchanged. If it’s a hallucination, it’s an especially enduring one, and she sobs, runs her hands into her hair only to pull them away when she feels the wetness on her scalp. Her hands are red, covered in blood. Still warm.

The body spread before her, put on display. A Y is cut down his chest, the sort of cut made by a medical examiner. They've done the work for him, saved him the task as his skin is pulled back to reveal the empty hollow of his chest, organs pulled from him and forgotten as her memory twitches, fades. Her own memory and mind are ever unreliable and she cannot understand the moments that lead to this one, where there is a knife at her feet and blood on her hands. Slivers cut through her thoughts, violent flashes that fade just as quickly as they come, cutting through the time she has forgotten.

What have they done?

She tries to step back but her feet are unsteady and she stumbles. He catches her before she falls, her back leaning against the supporting line of his chest. She is too shocked to pull away, and he takes the opportunity to hold her, wrap his arms around her waist. He presses a kiss into her curls before resting his chin on her shoulder.

His words are moist and warm against the shell of her ear when he speaks. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Giving them purpose in death, turning something otherwise ordinary and forgettable into art.” He admires his handiwork.

Admires her own, more hesitant one.

“I didn’t...I didn’t want to...why did I-”

He shushes her, interrupts the panicked whirring of her thoughts. “You’ve been unwell, but I guided you through. You’re very susceptible in these moments when you’re at your most vulnerable. So splendid,” he praises.

He makes the words sound like love.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” she says. The words are broken up by her breaths, sharp and hitched as panic sinks in. Her foundation- what little of it there was- crumbles like sand being pulled by the drag of an ocean. She chokes on the admission.

“You’re finding yourself,” he says simply. “The real you. And it is so delectable.”

He presses a kiss to her temple, then to her mouth.

He tastes metallic, like blood and sins and madness.

She relents, sinks into it.

She isn’t dreaming.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you all enjoyed! Please review!


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